Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

It dawns on me that I’m not a part of the grand technological experiment that is Northern California right now, nor a part either of those older dreams it has come to symbolize. I don’t belong to the redwoods, to the frozen yoghurt stands or the piney air. I’ve found myself a project here precisely because I am not from here. There is so much about this new digital world that is alien to me, but utterly familiar to Nancy. I am deflated and left behind, made spare by the sheer pace and scale of the change. I feel like a dazzled rabbit caught in headlights, a mere witness to the ballooning din and flux that is digital America, a self-indulgent stand-in. And as I watch Nancy striding across the plateau towards the woods again, I see she’s given me a vivid fragment of her life to take away and make flourish somewhere else. And I’m overcome by the stillness of understanding. What Nancy has known for a while and has patiently waited for me to discover is that the time has come for me to return to England, though that is where I least belong.

Saturday night has begun early in the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus. Samantha, fourteen, breath as short as a running dog, scrapes back the rope of her hair and turns to say something. Behind her, in the belly of the arcade, a swell of pubescent boys fuels the games machines and fills the room with the jangle of defeat and Samantha’s words are obliterated in the greater noise.

Today I’ll come clean. I’ll confess. I feel lost in the blizzard of youth culture.

Samantha, Samantha, oh please tell me do.

How shall I be young again, as young and hip as you?

We break a path across the floor, unnoticed. Me under cover of her.

‘Chopping through the enemy,’ says Samantha. She is through to round four of the Streetfighter II South of England Turbo Tournament. The only girl. This is what it takes to rise through the ranks, according to Samantha: ‘Guts and loads of practice.’

We remove to a bank of Streetfighter consoles pitched up against the back wall of the arcade. Samantha leans into the central deck, opens her callused baby hands, flips the supple wrists, stretches the finger clumps and lets them fall onto the joystick like a final act of homecoming. She closes her eyes for a moment, entertaining some thought, then smiles.

‘Double-jointed, ambidextrous Streetfighting champion,’ she says of herself, not having won the championship yet, but having ambitions.

And so there I am, loading tokens into a Streetfighter deck, about to lose to some peppery girl almost half my age while she waits nerves akimbo for the call-up.

‘I’ve actually never played Streetfighter,’ I say, suddenly aware of how it feels to be one of those antique judges for whom the Rolling Stones is a description of a chain gang.

‘Yeah, I can tell,’ Samantha replies. ‘But that’s all right.’ She winks at me and pushes her hair back again. ‘I ain’t gonna hammer you straight off. Wouldn’t be sporting, would it?’

Apparently Sam and I inhabit the same real-life world, but you wouldn’t know it.

Outside in the foyer a line of Streetfighter decks has been set up for the competition, alongside a sound system, a string of mikes and an outside broadcast unit. A computerized scoreboard hangs suspended from the escalator. About fifty kids, boys, are lined up along the row of decks, hands on joysticks, arms beating out the moves of the final leg of the third round. Behind a cordon another six hundred teens await their call-up for the fourth round. And behind them , so distant you can’t see their faces, another eight or nine hundred folk watching, tip-toeing to catch glimpses of their sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons, stepsons, whatever.

A boy with pudding-bowl hair detonates from the shadow of the arcade, looks Samantha almost in the eye, mumbles:

‘I got fucking mashed, man, and now I ain’t got no more money.’

‘You see my pockets bulging, man?’ asks Samantha in return, hard, with her hands on her thighs, calluses pressed in.

‘ This is my brother. Jez.’ Her eyes fill with mock impatience.

‘Sisterly love,’ grins the brother, hair part-concealing a face crazy with electric messages.

Sam and her brother came specially for the tournament, but Jez got knocked out in the second round by a Chinese boy from an arcade in Oxford Street. She hadn’t seen him since. She says he’s not a good loser, but it’s his own fault. He gets too cocky and doesn’t practise enough.

‘Why don’t you play and I’ll pay.’

‘Oh no, man, you don’t have to do that.’ Samantha’s voice sings high with guilty insincerity.

‘I can’t play anyway,’ I insist. ‘I’d rather watch. It’ll be like training.’

‘Wicked,’ says Jez, moving up to the console. ‘You going down.’ This from Jez, his right palm levitating over the start button, tongue coiled against lower lip in anticipation. ‘Which character?’

‘Ken,’ says Sam.

‘Man, you’re always Ken.’

‘I got the expertise.’ So Sam plays as Ken, the karate beach punk, and Jez plays as Blanka, the mutant Brazilian. Jez toggles the setting to a beach in America. Adrenaline drifts around them like heatwaves off sand. Jez raises his palm, holds the position as if startled into it, brings the force of his hand stamping down on start.

‘You dead man, dead,’ Jez’s voice twisted with the moment.

‘No, you dead, right?’ replies his sister.

A second’s stillness, like a snarl-up in a projection room, and brother and sister bear down on their joysticks with a series of spastic jerks and swings, closing in on the screen, elbows pumping like pistons. Jez flaps his tongue against his chin, then moves back from the console, eyes momentarily drifting across the room, but sightlessly, with a kind of narcoleptic thrill written on his face. Sam stays close in, rocks slightly. Two ghosts competing for the machine.

A boy wanders up from behind, comes to a standstill and fixes his stare on the deck. Jez, sensing his presence, chooses not to acknowledge the boy, maybe doesn’t know him. All over the arcade, pairs of stiffened kids are hanging over a console with an array of onlookers beside, by turns bored and in the thrall of it.

‘Spike it, give it some wellie.’

‘Combo Combo. Block, block, block.’ The boy uses his fists to scrub canals into the seams of his baggies.

‘C’mon, twist it, man,’ says Jez, keyed up and trying to control Blanka with a series of hops and piston movements.

Sam moves Ken in, charges Blanka with a close-range round-house kick. Blanka is in trouble.

‘Head butt him, Blanka,’ squeals the boy, thumping his thigh.

Too late. Sam and Jez slip from the console like drowned hands leaving driftwood.

‘I mashed you, man, first round over.’ Samantha leans back, unlocks her shoulders, breathes deep and smacks her lips in a sly way. Jez has had an idea.

‘Replay,’ he spits, wheeling round, glaring at the boy. ‘That boy fucking put me off. Unfair disadvantage.’

‘You just a bad loser,’ replies his sister.

‘C’mon, man.’ Jez holds his arms close to his chest, eyes grinning at me.

I shrug and smile off the appeal.

‘Replay, no way,’ says Samantha.

Round four opens with the star player, a boy from one of the Chinatown arcades with control-pad buttons for eyes, who has won all fifty of his games. A block of twitchy adrenaline he is, buoyed up with Coke. A couple of dozen nervous kids, Samantha included, scout the electronic running order, in search of their numbers, hoping they’re not pitched against Button-Eyes.